


Real and Not Real

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [5]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Homecoming, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-26 16:24:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12062718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: Some of the boys shook hands with the goons before they left: Farrier did not.*Spring, 1945. Chemnitz, Saxony, and Whitehall, London.





	1. Flughafen Kaledar, Chemnitz, Saxony, April 1945

They left on a Wednesday. It took them minutes to collect the possessions they’d held tight to over the years. Photographs and spoons. Paperbacks – dogeared and long coverless – and well-darned socks. Letters full of fondness. Farrier chipped a shard of whitewashed plaster from the wall of the kitchen and slipped it into his pocket. Gouging a deliberate wound into the flesh of the place; or a talisman of his resurrection. Even as the US Army trucks sped them away towards Chemnitz he felt the place begin to fade, and rubbed his thumb across the stolen trophy, and the jagged, crumbling edge was a reminder that it had been real, and long, and awful, and had robbed him of the remains of his youth.

Some of the boys shook hands with the goons before they left: Farrier did not. He caught a glimpse of the castle as they wound their way down the valley, on its craggy perch high above the town. A final backwards glance, a silent leave-taking. They’d brought him in under cover of darkness, years back when the war was still endless – he’d never seen it properly, the cage they’d kept him in. It was smaller than he’d imagined it, somehow. A crooked confection of spires and gables and thin, high windows, made by human hands who’d little dreamed what trials would one day take place within.

The place seemed to emit light; the white gleam of the walls almost pulsed. Farrier looked away, and when he next looked up, they were passing through thick forest, and the castle was out of sight.

There were signs of shelling as they left; their bunks had shaken from the barrage for several nights, and for the first time Farrier had been afraid. All the waiting, the wasted, static, _stagnant_ time. The thought of dying mistakenly like that, under the Yank artillery fire, ungloriously, grounded, was terrifying in its injustice. _For the first time I feel sure we will see each other again in this lifetime,_ he’d written in his last letter to Collins, two weeks previously, with Frankfurt in American hands and Vienna under Soviet siege. He’d watched from the window with the rest of them as the Yanks lit up the valley and begged silently to live, now that the end was at last in view.

A rumour whipped round the castle: their jailors had been ordered to execute all prisoners, before fleeing. A crazed, last-gasp thrill of fear, and then the shelling had stopped, with the Yanks nearly at the gates, and within hours they had been liberated. Just like that, it was over, bloodlessly.

The adrenaline seeped out of them, and by the time the Americans loaded them into trucks ready for transport back to Blighty, their limbs were heavy and their minds were numb with the magnitude of it; their unmitigated freedom, at last. It was over too suddenly – once they were prisoners, and in an instant they were not, with little fanfare or warning, and before they knew it the castle was a shadow fading in the distance. Farrier dozed, dreamless, in the several hours it took them to reach Chemnitz, his head lolling on his chest.

Then they waited at the airfield at Kaledar – the hardest waiting of the war. A cluster of the younger lads found a ball from somewhere and improvised a kickabout. Farrier wasn’t sure he could run now; his body was weak and seized-up from years of underuse, even after being subjected daily to the SBO’s mania for calisthenics. Or if he began to run, whether he’d ever be able to stop.

He propped himself in the shadow of the bullet-ridden terminal building and watched them tear shrieking across the runway. All that empty space. It began to rain gently, and Farrier tilted his face towards the boundless sky and felt it fresh and unimpaired on his skin. It was a strange thing to realise – that Germany was a beautiful country, and that such a place could produce monsters.

A brusque US Major found them a crate, eventually.

“Refuel at Rouen, and then on to Lyneham for debriefing.” He surveyed their ragtag group appraisingly – the scruffy, tardy dregs of His Majesty’s forces. “Imagine you lads will be damn pleased to be home,” he said.

Farrier wasn’t ready to think about home, or about what that might look like now, and neither was the SBO, by the way his jaw clenched as he returned the Major’s salute. They hoisted themselves into the belly of the plane without the susurrus of excited chatter that had followed them from Colditz.

Packed elbow to elbow, their knees jostling. Farrier’s stomach lurched as the engines fired up. He’d not been in a plane since that supernatural landing on a desolate French beach back in ’40. He’d not been in a plane someone else was flying since ’32, his final training flight. Even outside the prison walls, his body and his fate were still not yet his own. The wheels left the runway; they were airborne, and suddenly he found it again, the sensation he’d been trying to remember for five years, the impossible glee of flying. Germany was vanishing below them, and Farrier wished wildly that Collins was beside him, high up here, sharing his exhilaration, sharing his freedom.

He must have fallen asleep again after their stop at Rouen, because the next thing he remembered was a young radio operator nudging him apologetically, nearly tripping over the sea of stretched-out legs as he made his way down the crate.

“Sorry, sir,” the boy said, as Farrier came back to life. “The boss wanted you to see. We’re just coming over the coast now.”

Farrier tried to peer out; the window was filthy, and there was a scud of morning mist racing by.

And then suddenly he saw: the cliffs rising majestic from the sea. Almost dazzling. Pure, pure white.

“Sight for sore eyes,” Strachan said next to him, a little gruff.

Farrier tried to speak, and found he could not. They were closer now, and he could see the rippled, haphazard contours of the cliffs, and the ragged patches where they were not quite white. He could make out cottages dotted atop them – and a lighthouse, which instead of warning them away seemed to be saying _come, come. Come home._ The surf broke fierce against the base.

The cliffs were gleaming like the cold castle walls, and suddenly the kite pulled up again and they were in cloud, and Dover was behind them. And there was all of England dappled and lush spread out below them, and from up here they could see only the lustred, bucolic memory of the land they’d left, and not the graveyards or the bomb craters or the shattered lives or widowed brides or the love affairs cut off before they had begun.


	2. Whitehall, London, May 1945

Collins knew nobody at Cranwell, and didn’t much care to. The cadets under his charge were wide-eyed and boisterous, and – in recent weeks, especially – reckless. They knew the war was dwindling to a close; they knew the sacrifices they’d be called upon to make would be paltry, ultimately. A safe and sterile taste of war, enough to whet the appetite and fire the blood, enough to prove a modicum of manhood, but not enough to grind a soul down – with luck, not enough to kill.

The other instructors, for the most part, were old hands who’d gotten their wings in peacetime, and who still chafed at the truncated training programme. Some of them hadn’t been in the cockpit of a fighter for a decade; their shoulders tightened awkwardly when they saw him, and the mess Dieppe had made of his face.

Collins left every lecture feeling a fraud. _Luck,_ he wanted to spit at the rows of overgrown boys. _That’s all you need._ All those diagrams. Formations and feints. The reams of jargon. The aces he'd known, the daredevils and bravehearts, who'd died in their droves, for all their skill and all their courage. _Luck, and trust._ The rest was just window-dressing.

He kept to the book, of course, and they hung on his every word, their hairless young faces rapt. Eight kills and a DFC and bar earned a degree of awe, even this deep into the war. Or maybe they couldn’t drag their eyes away from the burns; maybe, instead of listening to his stumbled explanations of lag pursuit, they were wondering how much it had hurt, or how long it had taken to heal, or whether women still went with him, looking as he did.

He’d been billeted with an elderly schoolmaster in Lincoln since rotating out of active service the previous November. He lent Collins books about Roman architecture and fly-fishing and let him listen to _Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh_ on the wireless on Sunday evenings. They rubbed along together well, and Collins spent slow, uneventful weeks teaching interchangeable boys to fly, and felt his world shrinking every day.

He listened to the BBC between training sorties, smoking heavily to stop his hands from shaking. Days with good news, and days with dark, dark news. And still nothing from Farrier. Colditz had been liberated back in mid-April – they’d announced it on the wireless, and an almost painful jolt of joy had rushed through Collins’ whole body.

It subsided rapidly in the days following, when there was nothing but silence, and all he could do was look for clues in Farrier’s last, jumbled letter. Half-finished thoughts rambling across the page. _Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim_ scrawled almost as an afterthought at the bottom, below a shaky signature. Whether Farrier’d meant that last for Collins, or for himself, Collins couldn’t tell.

There’d been no word since. The Red Cross had been no use. “They’ll have sent him to Lyneham for demob, I shouldn’t wonder,” the girl on the line said airily. He’d wasted a day’s leave trekking to Wiltshire to find a dead end and a handful of probing questions. And no-one at Uxbridge was any the wiser. It felt like holding onto water. He’d been waiting for a ghost, all these years. He’d been waiting: that was revelation enough.

When the end came, it was expected and unexpected all at once. Hitler had been dead a week, and the cresting murmur of victory spread even as far as Lincolnshire. Collins requested a forty-eight hour pass to go to London – he’d some vague idea he’d spend the day laying into cowering adjutants until someone gave him some blasted information – and the CO gave him seventy-two.

“It’ll be over tomorrow, or the day after, at the outside,” he said, frowning at Collins over some paperwork. “You might as well be in the thick of it when it comes – Lord knows you’ve earned it.”

“Sir,” Collins said. A crisp salute, and within an hour he was on the train across to Nottingham. He had a vague idea Farrier had grown up there – though _near Nottingham,_ which was all Farrier had ever admitted, was likely code for some wooded estate with tennis courts and its own livery. It sent a small shiver through him, as he waited for his connection, to think of Farrier striding round-shouldered through the huge redbrick atrium, or else waiting beside a tower of luggage and lacrosse sticks, small and defiant, off to school for the first time.

After a further three hours rattling through the Leicestershire countryside, he alighted at St Pancras to find the surrender had been signed. The station was a maelstrom of noise and colour and elation. Even the guards’ whistles sounded merry. A pint-sized, black-haired Wren seized him around the neck before he’d taken three steps down the platform and kissed him soundly on both cheeks. She didn’t recoil at the feel of the rough, cratered scars.

“Thanks, lass,” he said, faintly bewildered, and could only manage a helpless laugh when she ran off with his dress cap.

There were crowds gathering already, on every street, a contagion of relief tearing through them. It was amazing – there wasn’t a one of them who’d made it through without some private suffering, and yet here they were, the whole damn country, brimming over with joy. _The world breaks everyone,_ Farrier had written, back at the beginning of their stilted correspondence, when his firm-handed letters had been coherent, and dependably stoic. _And afterward many are strong at the broken places._ Collins wandered dazedly between clusters of revellers, wondering what would happen when the joy receded, and the grief crept back in.

He abandoned his plan – there’d be no one willing to hear his complaints, no one with the patience for tales of a single vanished airman on this day, of all days – and found his feet dragging him towards the old watering-holes. Echoes of long-gone evenings in the city, soggy with drink to block out the thought of the next dance with death.

And shadows of the boys who’d drunk with them, and would no longer; suddenly the thought of seeing the remnants of the squadron again felt sickening, macabre, and he turned away, and headed for the river. Dusk was stealing over the city. Lights were coming on in every window.

Collins drifted aimlessly, alone, scuffing at an empty bottle with his boot. A fine mist of rain flattening his hair to his scalp. Couples scuttled past with their arms around each other. Rows of servicemen, their elbows linked, lumbered along, and snatches of drunken song echoed off the buildings. The war had been too real and too close for too long, yet this felt strangely unreal. A shallow, hazy dream, like a photograph faded in sunlight. Collins felt the same detached, disembodied calm he’d felt in the split-second before drowning, before Peter Dawson’s boathook had smashed through his canopy. Maybe after it all, numb was now all he knew how to feel.

They were putting up flags on Whitehall, ready for the next day’s celebration. Workers tottering on ladders, scaling the lampposts and the monuments. A riot of red, white, and blue. A jaunty salve for the haunted, hungry years. Collins would be there, too, no doubt, joining in with the _hurrahs_ and kissing women he’d never see again, and pretending that everything was resolved, and that all his dreams had come true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With apologies to Ovid and Hemingway.


End file.
